The Essential Gandhi (51 page)

I cannot imagine life without Ba.… Her passing has left a vacuum which never will be filled.… We lived together for sixty-two years.… And she passed away in my lap. Could it be better? I am happy beyond all measure.
³¹

 … Though for her sake I have welcomed her death as bringing freedom from living agony, I feel the loss more than I had thought I should. We were a couple outside the ordinary. [Continence, after the age of thirty-seven] knit us together as never before. We ceased to be two different entities.… The result was that she became truly my
better
half.
³²

 … I learnt the lesson on non-violence from my wife, when I tried to bend her to my will. Her determined resistance to my will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering my stupidity involved on the other, ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule over her, and in the end she became my teacher in non-violence.…
³³

[Six weeks after Kasturbai’s passing, Gandhi suffered a severe attack of benign tertian malaria, during which he was delirious. At first he thought he could cure it with a fruit-juice diet and fasting.
After two days he relented and took quinine, and in two days the fever disappeared.

On May 3, 1944, Gandhi’s physicians issued a bulletin saying his anemia was worse and his blood pressure low. Agitation for his release swept India. At 8
A.M
. May 6, Gandhi and his associates were released. This was Gandhi’s last time in jail. Altogether he spent 2,089 days in Indian and 249 days in South African prisons.]

[The nearer England came to victory the clearer it became that political changes in India could not be delayed.

By 1945, India was too restive to hold, and Britain had suffered too heavily in the war to contemplate the colossal expenditure of men and treasure that would have been required to suppress another nonviolent conflict with Gandhi or a violent contest if he lost control.

On July 26, the Labor Party defeated the Conservatives—Clement R. Attlee replaced Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.

On August 14, Japan’s surrender was accepted by the Allied Powers. The British Labor Government immediately announced that it sought “an early realization of self-government in India.”

Prime Minister Attlee announced that a British Cabinet mission consisting of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India; Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade; and Albert V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, were coming to India to settle the terms of liberation. Gandhi went to Delhi to meet the British ministers and stayed in the untouchables’ slums where Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence and Alexander, as well as many Indians, visited him regularly.

After weeks of study, the Cabinet mission issued a statement: “We were greatly impressed by the very genuine and acute anxiety of the Moslems lest they should find themselves subjected to a perpetual Hindu-majority rule. This has become so strong and widespread amongst the Moslems that it cannot be allayed by mere paper safeguards. If there is to be internal peace in India it must be secured by measures which will insure to the Moslems a control in all matters vital to their culture, religion and economic and other interests.”
¹

The division of India—part for the Moslems, part for the Hindus—the mission said, would weaken the country’s defenses and violently tear in two its communications and transport systems. “Finally there is the geographical fact that the two halves to the proposed [Moslem] Pakistan State are separated by some seven hundred miles and the communications between them both in war and peace would be dependent on the goodwill of Hindustan.…”
²

Gandhi regarded the vivisection of India as] blasphemy.

[The demand for Pakistan] as put forth by the Moslem League is un-Islamic and I have not hesitated to call it sinful. Islam stands for unity and the brotherhood of mankind, not for disrupting the oneness of the human family. Therefore, those who want to divide India into possibly warring groups are enemies alike of India and Islam. They may cut me to pieces but they cannot make me subscribe to something which I consider to be wrong.
³

A friend from Eastern Pakistan asks how can I declare myself an inhabitant of undivided India when it is cut into two, and when to be of one part excludes you from the other? Whatever the legal pundits may say, they cannot dominate the mind of man. Who can prevent the friend from declaring himself as a citizen of the world even though legally he is not, and though he may be, as he will be, prevented from entering many States under their laws? Legal status should not worry a man who has not reduced himself to the state of a machine as many of us have. So long as the moral condition is sound, there is no warrant for anxiety. What every one of us has to guard against is the harboring of ill-will against a State or its people.…
⁴

In actual life, it is impossible to separate us into two nations. We are not two nations. Every Moslem will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history. Every Moslem is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam. That does not create nationality.… We in India have a common culture. In the North, Hindi and Urdu are understood by both Hindus and Moslems. In Madras, Hindus and Moslems speak Tamil, and in Bengal, they
both speak Bengali and neither Hindi nor Urdu. When communal riots take place, they are always provoked by incidents over cows and by religious processions. That means that it is our superstitions that create the trouble and not our separate nationalities.
⁵

 … We must not cease to aspire, in spite of [the] wild talk, to befriend all Moslems and hold them fast as prisoners of our love.
⁶

[If] India is divided she will be lost forever. Therefore … if India is to remain undivided, Hindus and Moslems must live together in brotherly love, not in hostile camps organized either for defensive action or retaliation.…
⁷

[On August 12, 1946, Lord Wavell, the British Viceroy, commissioned Nehru to form the government. Nehru went to see Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the President of the Moslem League, and offered him a choice of places in the Government for the League. Jinnah refused.

On September 2, Nehru became Prime Minister of India. Jinnah proclaimed September 2 a day of mourning and instructed Moslems to display black flags. The Moslem League announced that it would abstain from the national Constituent Assembly.

The Moslem League had declared August 16 “Direct Action Day.” Savage riots lasting four days broke out in Calcutta. “Official estimates,” wrote Lord Pethick-Lawrence, “placed the casualties at some five thousand killed and fifteen thousand wounded, and unofficial figures were higher still.”
⁸

Every day Gandhi preached against the uninterrupted violence between the two communities.]

 … Fratricide will not abate by intimidation and violence.… If through deliberate courage the Hindus had died to a man, that would have been the deliverance of Hinduism and India, and purification for Islam in this land. As it was, a third party [the British] had to intervene.… Neither the Moslems nor the Hindus … have gained by the intervention.…
⁹

 … Hindus and Moslems [must] realize that if India is to be an independent nation, one or both must deliberately cease to look to British authority for protection.… Whoever wants to drink the ozone of freedom must steel himself against seeking military or police aid. He or they must ever rely upon their own strong arms or what is infinitely better, their strong mind and will, which are independent of arms, their own or others’.
¹⁰

 … A nation that desires alien troops for its safety, internal or external, or has them imposed upon it, can never be described as independent in any sense of the term. It is an effete nation unfit for self-government. The acid test is that it should be able to stand alone, erect and unbending. During the interim period [while power is being transferred from British hands] we must learn to hop unaided if we are to walk when we are free. We must cease from now to be spoon-fed.

That … things are not happening as we would wish is to be accounted as our weakness … not the cussedness of the British Government or their people. Whatever we get will be our deserts, not a gift from across the seas.…
¹¹

[The] thirteen-months’ stay of British power and British arms are really a hindrance rather than a help because everybody looks for help to the great military machine they have brought into being.…
¹²

…
This ancient method of progressing by making mistakes and correcting them is the proper way. Keep a child in cotton wool and you stunt it or kill it. If you will let it develop into a robust man, you will expose his body to all weathers, teaching him how to defy them. Precisely in the same manner, a government worth the name has to show the nation how to face deficits, bad weather and other handicaps of life through its own collective effort instead of its being helped to live effortlessly any how.
¹³

I would love to attempt an answer to a question which has been addressed to me from more than one quarter of the globe. It is:
How can you account to the growing violence among your own people on the part of political parties for the furtherance of political ends?… Does your message of non-violence still hold good for the world?…

In reply I must confess my bankruptcy, not that of nonviolence.…

One more question has been and is being asked: If you are certain that India is going the wrong way, why do you associate with the wrongdoers? Why do you not plough your own lovely furrow and have faith that if you are right, your erstwhile friends and followers will seek you out?… All I can say is that my faith is as strong as ever. It is quite possible that my technique is faulty.… Millions like me may fail to prove the truth in their own lives, that would be their failure, never of the eternal law.
¹⁴

Hope for the future I have never lost and never will.… The failure of my technique of non-violence causes no loss of faith in non-violence itself.…
¹⁵

There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organized for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the [Hindu-Moslem riots] and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of non-violent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms.